Sail the sea with The Merry Lee

Hola Amigos,

We had organized a few boats to leave with us on Saturday, but as frequently happens for "Crossings", people were waiting for "4 birds in the bush". Since we had a plane to catch on December 10th , we left by ourselves at 7.
We arrived in Los Muertos at 4 PM. Lewis cleaned the hull by free diving on it. That is a lot of breath holding with a 7 foot keel. A clean hull can improve your speed by 10%. After a simple dinner we went to sleep at 6:30 PM and hoped to sleep 'til 2 AM.
Anticipation and 20 knot winds woke us up at 11:30 PM. Turns out that they also woke up three other boats planning on crossing. We pulled up the anchor at 12:30 and away we went.
Stan of Solmatesantiago's weather prediction of a benign crossing came to fruition. In fact everyone had to slow down to prevent a nighttime landing.
After 31 hours we arrived at Mazatlan at sunrise and inched our way to the treacherous El Cid entrance. It is as narrow as we remembered even with the Dreaded Dredger safely moored aside. While low tide was not to occur until 10 AM, we only had 2 feet of water under our keel at the entrance. A raging flood tide added a few more difficulty points to the entry.
While still congratulating ourselves on a successful docking at the fuel dock, a marina official told us we had 1 minute to leave because a 80 foot power boat was coming in 2 minutes to off load a seriously ill Captain.
The channel now looked like a Whitewater Kayak Olympic course. Several boaters on the dock heard our engine red-lining as we made a U-turn then a desperate reverse. We had 5 people directing us to the only open slip in the marina.
Stan's prediction for tonight is for 20-25 knot winds and 5 to 7 ft seas. We are safely docked at B21 and have greatly improved our chances of making our flight.

Happy Trail Crossings to You until we Blog again.

The Merry Lee